It’s the Effing Effort That Counts

28052009

Right now, I’m installing Windows XP on the HP Mini 1000. I’ve partitioned the measley 60 GB 1.8″ PATA hard drive of the netbook, giving 4 GB to Bill Gates’ most ubiquitous OS as of the moment — ok, the most ubiquitous OS ever in the world. My external DVD drive has been wheering away for almost an hour now — oh, it’s stopped and I’m being asked to click on Next and then enter my product key whose all 25 characters I’ve practically memorized by heart — and gone over 1 reboot already.

Why am I doing this anyway? Didn’t I vow to love and cherish MacBook Mini forever? And that means with only Leopard as our main OS? Well, I’d been dumb enough to screw up the HP Mini’s bios with DMI edit – it’s now a Compaq and not an HP. I’m thinking reflashing the bios will restore the HP logo; I’d still have to find out once I get into Win XP and run the WinFlash utility from HP.

Silly me; I wanted so hard to cling on to MacBook Mini that in avoiding to obliterate Mac OS X, even just for a while, I even thought running Redmond’s baby via Parallels would do the trick and save me both from the agony of seeing XP (and using XP) and installing it. But it appears that one cannot flash the bios with a utility that’s made to run only on Windows in a pseudo Windows environment courtesy of virtualization. Nope. Nah-uh.

Aside from the obvious fact that I’m showing symptoms being Obsessive-Compulsive by wanting to get back the HP logo on my boot splash screen, what other purpose would having Win XP on the Mini serve?

I’ve decided to keep Win XP for good. Yes. As much as I hate it, until I find a way to teach myself how to create a BartPE bootable UFD, I’m stuck with this setup so I can:

1) update my bios – because the obsessive compulsive in me cannot stand not being able to stay up to date.
– I’ve flashed my bios to F.13 and it’s still a Compaq logo! =(

2) uTorrent on the MacBook Wind takes infinity (no kidding, there’s the infinity loop symbol alright for estimated download time). People have always said, at least those peeps on the net, that torrenting is always faster in Windows. So I’m gonna try.

3) On the MacBook Wind, streaming is also slow. Flash is notorious in Mac OS X, I’ll have to see in Windows. So there.
— Darn it! I just prepared the other bigger partition for OS X, and then just for kicks, tried to boot into Windows first, and here’s what I get: